Music Moves for Piano was created to achieve the goal of music literacy through the development of audiation and performing skills. Music Moves for Piano applies Edwin E. Gordon's Music Learning Theory( theory of Audiation) to piano instruction. Music Moves for Piano also builds on the revolutionary thinking of Orff, Dalcroze, Suzuki, Kodaly and Taubman. From the beginning of lessons, students learn how to audiate while they develop keyboard performing skills.

Music is Multi-dimensional , but research indicates that students best learn to understand music by their ability to audiate tonal content within the context of tonality and rhythm content within the context of a meter.

Gordon provides learning sequences to help students acquire a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns . A Large pattern vocabulary is the foundation for becoming a musical thinker and performer who audiates, or hears music with understanding.

Extensive research about how the brain perceive and learns music provides answer to the following questions and many more:

* Why can students play difficult repertoire and not be able to play "Happy Birthday " without music?

* Why can some students play cadences fluently, yet be unable to improvise on tonic and dominant chords?

* Why can many adults , after years of study, only play a few pieces that they learned in high school?

*Why are so many adults unable to read unfamiliar music or accompany singers and instrumentalists?

*Why do creating and improvising seem impossible to many adults who can read music?

The answer: These students have not yet learned to think

musically. They have not yet learned to "audiate" music. Audiation is essential for developing musicianship. Audiation is to music what thought is to language and visualization is to what we see.

How do students learn to audiate?The process is the same as language. From birth we listen before we speak. Then we begin to think speak, and acquire a vocabulary. After a large thinking, speaking, and listening vocabulary is acquired and there has been

much improvisational conversation, we learn to read and write. Aural learning precedes reading and writing.

Just as language vocabulary provides the basis for understanding and communicating ideas and thoughts, a tonal and rhythm pattern vocabulary is the foundation for learning, performing, improvising, reading, writing , and understanding music.

Movement and singing are important in the pattern learning process. Rhythm is based on body movement and singing develops tonal audiation.

Rhythm and tonal patterns are the "content"of music. They are learned in the context of meter or tonality. Patterns have meaning, or function and are organized in categories. They are learned in a certain order , or sequence.

Music notes have meaning only when they are part of a pattern that is in a context. Naming individual notes, intervals, and chords or naming lines and spaces, and counting are ways of learning about music that do not relate to a tonal or rhythm context.

Through sequenced instruction, piano students learn two instruments: a performing instrument and an audiation instrument. The ear and the mind learn to audiate before the eyes can read music notation with comprehension. If this does not happen, there most likely will be mental confusion when performing, listening to, or reading music.